The metaphysical question which men were then so fond of discussing, whether matter can think, appears very far removed indeed from the sphere of political conceptions.

The psychological question whether our ideas are innate, or are solely given to us by experience through the sensations, may strike the publicist as having the least possible to do with the type of a government or the aims of a community.
Yet it is really the conclusions to which men come in this region, that determine the quality of the civil sentiment and the significance of political organisation.

The theological doctors who persecuted De Prades for suggestions of Locke's psychology, and for high treason against Cartesianism, were guided by a right instinct of self-preservation.

De Maistre, by far the most acute and penetrating of the Catholic school, was never more clear-sighted than when he made a vigorous and deliberate onslaught upon Bacon, the centre of his movement against revolutionary principles.[158] As we have said before, the immediate force of speculative literature hangs on practical opportuneness.

It was not merely because Bacon and Hobbes and Locke had written certain books, that the Encyclopaedists, who took up their philosophic succession, inevitably became a powerful political party, and multiplied their adherents in an increasing proportion as the years went on.